I was raised a Catholic, but I left some years ago. Or maybe the church left me.
I too was raised in Catholic schools, and felt abandoned by the church. I am just now discovering faith again, and the power that it has over the human spirit. I have come to realize that all churches are man-made and imperfect, while God supersedes man. Fortunately, we are told by God (Christ) that churches don't matter all that much to Him (Matt 18:20). He will be present wherever, whenever and however two or more gather in His name, no matter which brand of sinners they may be.
These days I worship with Lutheran sinners, though I do not consider myself a Lutheran. I think of myself only as a Christian without any particular liturgy. This frees me up to think about the big picture: salvation, the power of faith, charitableness, forgiveness, hope. In particular, I think it is the loss of hope that has so devastated younger people: their failure to hope has engulfed them, and they embrace despair through such things as environmentalism, all manner of sexual deviancy, and the routine use of psychotropic drugs. These are the things that are replacing religion for young people, and they are empty of promise in comparison to The Word.
Because I interact with young people a lot as a professor, I try in my own way to influence them indirectly through my teachings in business. One point I hammer on quite frequently is that it is better to have faith in a lie than to have no faith in the truth. I usually frame this in terms of business propositions, but it applies to religion as well. The proof I offer for the proposition that it is better to have faith in a lie, is the drug companies' clinical trials. It turns out that the vast majority of drugs these companies test do not work better than placebos, and that placebos tend to be successful about 20 percent of the time. There is but one explanation for this: faith. If people have faith in a thing, then that faith alone will give the thing power.
Why someone would want to walk around in this life without taking advantage of it is beyond me.